Subdomain and Google

FrankC

With some help from the helpdesk, I have now set up a subdomain on my main website to access my Smugmug site. This works fine.

However, I am now wondering how best to deal with this in relation to Google sitemaps and Google indexing. From a Google POV, I would like my smugmug subdomain to be seen as a part of my main site. I presume I can do this by including referring links to it on the main site, and including it in the main site sitemap.

However I am now wondering (to avoid duplicate content in Google etc.) what I should use for the "Hello World" setting on the Control Panel. Should I set this to "Homepage Only" or even "No" on the basis that Google will index the site via the sitemap on my main site ?

(Or, to put it another way, I would like my Smugmug site indexed as photos.frankcourtney.com rather than frankc.smugmug.com - but not both !)

Thanks for any advice relating to the above. Frank

rainforest1155

Hi Frank,

You can't tell Google which address to prefer, but you can certainly control it to a certain amount. It's all about the links that Google finds on the internet pointing to your site. So if you can go out and make sure that your site is linked everywhere with your custom domain, Google should honor this over time. Starting a blog etc helps a lot, too, to create useful links to your site. Read these suggestions for more tips.

Do not change the hello world setting - leave it at yes or you would tell Google to stop indexing your SmugMug site.

I don't know if you could use the sitemap feature for your SmugMug custom domain page.

Sebastian

FrankC

Thanks for your reply Sebastian.

I have now merged both 'sites' for Google Analytics purposes and that's working fine so far.

I was just worried that there might be a Google 'penalty' for having the same content under two different subdomains (i.e. frankc.smugmug.com and photos.frankcourtney.com). However, I think they can cope with it !

F.

LichtenHansen

Google 'penalty' for same content under two different subdomains

FrankC wrote:

I was just worried that there might be a Google 'penalty' for having the same content under two different subdomains (i.e. frankc.smugmug.com and photos.frankcourtney.com). However, I think they can cope with it !

Google recommend in their Webmaster guidelines:

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

You can always hope that Google will cope with it.